HRH The Prince of Wales has missed the point spectacularly in his beautifully delivered Thought for the Day this morning.
His Royal Highness failed to notice that the very things he seeks to protect - namely, the various, mutually contradictory, incompatible, divisive claims made by the world's currently popular religions - form the root cause of the violence and persecution he finds so difficult to believe still go on. He reminds me of a typical American gun enthusiast, championing the right to bear arms as the corpses of mass shooting victims pile higher, year upon year.
Below is the full text of His Royal Highness' speech, italicised, with my responses in clear text.
In London recently I met a Jesuit priest from Syria. He gave me a graphic account of what life is like for those Christians he was forced to leave behind. He told me of mass kidnappings in parts of Syria and Iraq and how he feared that Christians will be driven en masse out of lands described in the Bible. He thought it quite possible there will be no Christians in Iraq within five years. Clearly, for such people, religious freedom is a daily, stark choice between life and death.
His Royal Highness speaks as though Christianity were an unalterable state of being, into which one is born and will so remain until one's dying day. His reference to the Bible implies that the aforementioned, man-made document is a title deed to a sovereign land, guaranteeing right of occupancy to members of the stipulated confession. Both these assumptions are foundation stones of conflict, leading to the very tragedies the Prince so eloquently bemoans. Give two or more sets of people different labels based on discrepant holy texts, each of which you've convinced its fans is the one true revelation of their deity, and watch them fight it out. It is hardly psychological rocket science. Does it cross the Prince's mind that education and rational thinking might place today's gods alongside Ra, Thor, Mithras, Baal, Odin, Neptune and hundreds of others, in the history books? Such a solution is achievable within a remarkably short time frame. Theoretically, it could be accomplished within a single generation. As a thought experiment, imagine a Roman baby, taken at birth and brought in a time machine to the 21st century. Would she automatically grow up worshipping Mars and Jupiter? Of course not. Likely, she would become infected with extant trending religious trivia in the household of her adoptive parents. If you still doubt the feasibility of the religious mind virus's rapid eradication, look to Scandinavia, where theists number one in twenty at best. I imagine the Ancient Egyptians were utterly convinced that belief in Horus and Seth would never die out.
The scale of religious persecution around the world is not widely appreciated. Nor is it limited to Christians in the troubled regions of the Middle East. A recent report suggests that attacks are increasing on Yazidis, Jews, Ahmadis, Baha’is and many other minority faiths. And in some countries even more insidious forms of extremism have recently surfaced, which aim to eliminate all types of religious diversity.
Religious diversity is the root cause of all of religious persecution. All of it. It is a central tenet of religious teaching that the religion one follows is the one true path. Every religion teaches that. Some liberal theists are, rather condescendingly, prepared to tolerate followers of other faiths, but it is logically impossible to accept that mutually contradictory beliefs can be simultaneously true, so tension inevitably prevails. Religion is emphatically not all about being nice to one another, despite the disturbingly prevalent opinion that it is.
We are also struggling to capture the immensity of the ripple effect of such persecution. According to the United Nations, 5.8 million MORE people abandoned their homes in 2015 than the year before, bringing the annual total to a staggering 65.3 million. That is almost equivalent to the entire population of the United Kingdom.
The Prince unwittingly underscores the point that the world has lost its sense of perspective. One's home and family are among the most important things in one's life, and one's life is all one has, the baseless claims of wily, manipulative clerics, seeking to use the gullible for their own ends (see the reference to Mohammed below), notwithstanding. If 65 million people have to give up some or all of that because of religious persecution, then religious persecution is a problem serious enough to warrant tackling through education. The spread of HIV and the inhuman horror of racism have both been reduced markedly through well-coordinated education programmes. Religious diversity, like drink-driving, is an indulgence society can ill afford. The cost is too great, whatever benefits may be falsely claimed.
And the suffering doesn’t end when they arrive seeking refuge in a foreign land. We are now seeing the rise of many populist groups across the world that are increasingly aggressive towards those who adhere to a minority faith.
In every single one of those cases, the aggressor himself is impelled to behave so by his own religious lights. That fact alone ought to convict religion, in the eyes of the public, as the source of an enormous amount of evil.
All of this has deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s. I was born in 1948 – just after the end of World War II in which my parents' generation had fought, and died, in a battle against intolerance, monstrous extremism and an inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. That, nearly seventy years later, we should still be seeing such evil persecution is, to me, beyond all belief. We owe it to those who suffered and died so horribly not to repeat the horrors of the past.
His Royal Highness is undoubtedly referring to the barbaric acts of Hitler, a self-professed Roman Catholic who claimed repeatedy, along with his followers, that Nazi Germany had a divine mandate to win the second world war and seek global domination. 'Beyond all belief' is exactly where the civilized world should be in the 21st century, freed from the shackles of millennia of misguided, stultifying religious repression, throughout much of which it was mortally dangerous to utter a dissenting thought.
Normally, at Christmas, we think of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I wonder, though, if this year we might remember how the story of the Nativity unfolds – with the fleeing of the Holy Family to escape violent persecution. And we might also remember that when the Prophet Mohammed migrated from Mecca to Medina, he did so because he, too, was seeking the freedom for himself and his followers to worship.
The Prophet Mohammed, in considerable personal danger from the exploitative polytheistic profiteers of Mecca, to whose livelihood he was a perceived threat, decamped to Medina to raise an army of cudgel-wielding ruffians, each convinced by him that they would be fast-tracked to paradise if they were fortunate enough to die in battle while fighting on his side. The said army returned to Mecca and massacred the polytheists who were, one assumes, pursuing freedom for themselves and their followers to worship as they wished. As for the transparently confected account of the nativity, on whose sequence of events no two of the gospels remotely agree, one would have thought that an omnipotent god interested in redeeming mankind could have made a better plan, without the loose cannon of a piqued despot seeking to slay his potential rival, and the grim fate of the hundreds of infants who were consequently slaughtered.
Whichever religious path we follow, the destination is the same - to value and respect the other person, accepting their right to live out their peaceful response to the love of God.
Flatly, no. The destination may be the same, but it is the inevitability of irrational rivalry and divisive tribalism. The religion virus's master stroke is to convince us all that religion is all about being nice to one another, when it in fact sets us at one another's throats.
That’s what I saw when attending the consecration of the Syriac Orthodox Cathedral in London recently. Here were a people persecuted for their religion in their own country, but finding refuge in another land and freedom to practise their faith according to their conscience.
It is an example to inspire us all this Christmastime.
No ostentatious public display of exclusive religious fealty is likely to inspire peace nor harmony in the world. If theists genuinely fear persecution, their safest course of action is to worship quietly in private or in small groups. That way they are unlikely to attract the interest of potential persecutors, absent the red rag of holier-than-thou provocation.
His Royal Highness failed to notice that the very things he seeks to protect - namely, the various, mutually contradictory, incompatible, divisive claims made by the world's currently popular religions - form the root cause of the violence and persecution he finds so difficult to believe still go on. He reminds me of a typical American gun enthusiast, championing the right to bear arms as the corpses of mass shooting victims pile higher, year upon year.
Below is the full text of His Royal Highness' speech, italicised, with my responses in clear text.
In London recently I met a Jesuit priest from Syria. He gave me a graphic account of what life is like for those Christians he was forced to leave behind. He told me of mass kidnappings in parts of Syria and Iraq and how he feared that Christians will be driven en masse out of lands described in the Bible. He thought it quite possible there will be no Christians in Iraq within five years. Clearly, for such people, religious freedom is a daily, stark choice between life and death.
His Royal Highness speaks as though Christianity were an unalterable state of being, into which one is born and will so remain until one's dying day. His reference to the Bible implies that the aforementioned, man-made document is a title deed to a sovereign land, guaranteeing right of occupancy to members of the stipulated confession. Both these assumptions are foundation stones of conflict, leading to the very tragedies the Prince so eloquently bemoans. Give two or more sets of people different labels based on discrepant holy texts, each of which you've convinced its fans is the one true revelation of their deity, and watch them fight it out. It is hardly psychological rocket science. Does it cross the Prince's mind that education and rational thinking might place today's gods alongside Ra, Thor, Mithras, Baal, Odin, Neptune and hundreds of others, in the history books? Such a solution is achievable within a remarkably short time frame. Theoretically, it could be accomplished within a single generation. As a thought experiment, imagine a Roman baby, taken at birth and brought in a time machine to the 21st century. Would she automatically grow up worshipping Mars and Jupiter? Of course not. Likely, she would become infected with extant trending religious trivia in the household of her adoptive parents. If you still doubt the feasibility of the religious mind virus's rapid eradication, look to Scandinavia, where theists number one in twenty at best. I imagine the Ancient Egyptians were utterly convinced that belief in Horus and Seth would never die out.
The scale of religious persecution around the world is not widely appreciated. Nor is it limited to Christians in the troubled regions of the Middle East. A recent report suggests that attacks are increasing on Yazidis, Jews, Ahmadis, Baha’is and many other minority faiths. And in some countries even more insidious forms of extremism have recently surfaced, which aim to eliminate all types of religious diversity.
Religious diversity is the root cause of all of religious persecution. All of it. It is a central tenet of religious teaching that the religion one follows is the one true path. Every religion teaches that. Some liberal theists are, rather condescendingly, prepared to tolerate followers of other faiths, but it is logically impossible to accept that mutually contradictory beliefs can be simultaneously true, so tension inevitably prevails. Religion is emphatically not all about being nice to one another, despite the disturbingly prevalent opinion that it is.
We are also struggling to capture the immensity of the ripple effect of such persecution. According to the United Nations, 5.8 million MORE people abandoned their homes in 2015 than the year before, bringing the annual total to a staggering 65.3 million. That is almost equivalent to the entire population of the United Kingdom.
The Prince unwittingly underscores the point that the world has lost its sense of perspective. One's home and family are among the most important things in one's life, and one's life is all one has, the baseless claims of wily, manipulative clerics, seeking to use the gullible for their own ends (see the reference to Mohammed below), notwithstanding. If 65 million people have to give up some or all of that because of religious persecution, then religious persecution is a problem serious enough to warrant tackling through education. The spread of HIV and the inhuman horror of racism have both been reduced markedly through well-coordinated education programmes. Religious diversity, like drink-driving, is an indulgence society can ill afford. The cost is too great, whatever benefits may be falsely claimed.
And the suffering doesn’t end when they arrive seeking refuge in a foreign land. We are now seeing the rise of many populist groups across the world that are increasingly aggressive towards those who adhere to a minority faith.
In every single one of those cases, the aggressor himself is impelled to behave so by his own religious lights. That fact alone ought to convict religion, in the eyes of the public, as the source of an enormous amount of evil.
All of this has deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s. I was born in 1948 – just after the end of World War II in which my parents' generation had fought, and died, in a battle against intolerance, monstrous extremism and an inhuman attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. That, nearly seventy years later, we should still be seeing such evil persecution is, to me, beyond all belief. We owe it to those who suffered and died so horribly not to repeat the horrors of the past.
His Royal Highness is undoubtedly referring to the barbaric acts of Hitler, a self-professed Roman Catholic who claimed repeatedy, along with his followers, that Nazi Germany had a divine mandate to win the second world war and seek global domination. 'Beyond all belief' is exactly where the civilized world should be in the 21st century, freed from the shackles of millennia of misguided, stultifying religious repression, throughout much of which it was mortally dangerous to utter a dissenting thought.
Normally, at Christmas, we think of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I wonder, though, if this year we might remember how the story of the Nativity unfolds – with the fleeing of the Holy Family to escape violent persecution. And we might also remember that when the Prophet Mohammed migrated from Mecca to Medina, he did so because he, too, was seeking the freedom for himself and his followers to worship.
The Prophet Mohammed, in considerable personal danger from the exploitative polytheistic profiteers of Mecca, to whose livelihood he was a perceived threat, decamped to Medina to raise an army of cudgel-wielding ruffians, each convinced by him that they would be fast-tracked to paradise if they were fortunate enough to die in battle while fighting on his side. The said army returned to Mecca and massacred the polytheists who were, one assumes, pursuing freedom for themselves and their followers to worship as they wished. As for the transparently confected account of the nativity, on whose sequence of events no two of the gospels remotely agree, one would have thought that an omnipotent god interested in redeeming mankind could have made a better plan, without the loose cannon of a piqued despot seeking to slay his potential rival, and the grim fate of the hundreds of infants who were consequently slaughtered.
Whichever religious path we follow, the destination is the same - to value and respect the other person, accepting their right to live out their peaceful response to the love of God.
Flatly, no. The destination may be the same, but it is the inevitability of irrational rivalry and divisive tribalism. The religion virus's master stroke is to convince us all that religion is all about being nice to one another, when it in fact sets us at one another's throats.
That’s what I saw when attending the consecration of the Syriac Orthodox Cathedral in London recently. Here were a people persecuted for their religion in their own country, but finding refuge in another land and freedom to practise their faith according to their conscience.
It is an example to inspire us all this Christmastime.
No ostentatious public display of exclusive religious fealty is likely to inspire peace nor harmony in the world. If theists genuinely fear persecution, their safest course of action is to worship quietly in private or in small groups. That way they are unlikely to attract the interest of potential persecutors, absent the red rag of holier-than-thou provocation.
